New York Fed says remote work is hurting young workers' mentorship

New York Fed researchers Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington and Amanda Pallais said remote work explains 64 percent of the recent increase in unemployment among young college graduates, after the March 2026 unemployment rate for recent grads ages 22 to 27 reached 5.6 percent, up from 3.6 percent in March 2019.

The June 1 research post framed the problem less as a broad indictment of flexibility than as a management failure. Youth unemployment has moved sharply higher since the pandemic, while unemployment among workers under 29 averaged 3.1 percent in 2017-19 and 3.7 percent in 2022-25. Over the same periods, unemployment among more experienced college graduates dipped from 1.9 percent to 1.8 percent, a split that points to younger workers being hit hardest. The timing also matters: the authors say the rise lines up more closely with remote work than with generative AI, which has dominated a lot of recent workplace anxiety.

For monday.com, that is a direct challenge to the way hybrid teams are run. The company says most teams spend three days a week together in the office, with the rest left flexible, and its careers page lists 169 jobs in 17 locations. Its hiring flow includes recruiter chats, short tasks or interviews, and meetings with future teammates, which puts structure around entry points but still leaves day-to-day apprenticeship to managers. The remote-work and onboarding material on monday.com’s site points in the right direction, with guidance on employee onboarding, remote-work requests, and milestone-based progression roadmaps built around monday work management.

The practical issue is not whether senior engineers, product managers, and sellers can do strong work asynchronously. It is whether managers have built the routines that let junior people absorb context quickly. That means tighter meeting norms, explicit buddy systems, planned shadowing, clearer written standards, and faster feedback loops, especially when teams are split across Tel Aviv, New York, Denver, London, Warsaw, Sydney, Melbourne, São Paulo and Tokyo. monday.com said in March 2025 that its platform served about 245,000 customers across more than 200 industries and over 200 countries and territories, and it later said more than 250,000 customers worldwide use the platform.

The scale helps explain why the issue matters inside the company as much as outside it. monday.com reported fourth-quarter 2025 revenue of $333.9 million and full-year revenue growth of 27 percent, which means it is still adding people and customers while asking teams to work across time zones. In that kind of setup, remote work does not fail because people are absent; it fails when the organization assumes mentorship will happen by osmosis instead of design.